Terrorist

Two men robbed a factory wages clerk in north London and turned the whole of Tottenham into a running battlefield for six miles and two hours, and both of them shot themselves rather than be taken. January 1909. They took a bag of cash outside a rubber works, opened fire immediately, and then ran — on foot, then by hijacked tram, then by milk cart, then by greengrocer's van, then on foot again — firing over their shoulders the entire way at police, at civilians, at anyone who came near. Roughly four hundred rounds were fired that morning. A ten-year-old boy was killed. A police constable was killed. Somewhere around two dozen people were wounded. Neither man was ever going to stop running, and neither had any intention of being arrested.

The chase became a public spectacle because ordinary Londoners joined in. Police carrying truncheons borrowed revolvers and shotguns from gunsmiths and passers-by, some of them badly maintained, some of the ammunition wrong for the weapon. Men on bicycles pursued a hijacked tram. A crowd followed on foot across marshland. The two robbers had Bergmann and Browning pistols and were competent with them; the pursuit had whatever it could find. Lepidus was cornered in a cottage at Oak Cottage, Hale End, and shot himself as the police closed in. Helfeld, hit at a fence, put his own pistol to his head and lingered three weeks before dying in hospital. It became known as the Tottenham Outrage, and it changed British policing: it is a direct reason the Metropolitan Police began seriously reconsidering how officers were armed.

They were Latvians who had fled the crushed 1905 revolution against the Russian Tsar, and they arrived into the same East End world of sweatshops, boarding houses, and political exile that produced Gardstein two years later. Lepidus had a brother who had blown himself up in Paris carrying a bomb intended for a French official. The money was expropriation — funds taken for the cause, not for themselves — which was doctrine, and by the time it reached a rubber works payroll in Tottenham the doctrine had worn down into two men, one bag, and no plan for afterwards.

The political consequence landed on people who had nothing to do with it. The press treated it as proof that the country had let in something dangerous, and the argument fed straight into the immigration politics that followed. The two men are buried without ceremony and remembered under a name given to them by a newspaper.

Forget the four hundred rounds and the six miles. Remember only this: they never once considered a version of that morning in which they walked away — they simply decided who was going with them.